stopping Trump\u2019s\u00a0pardon power from wrecking their case.<\/a><\/p>\nPre-emptive pardons are a distinct possibility now that current and former Trump advisers are under Mueller\u2019s scrutiny. Trump himself has tweeted that everyone agrees the U.S. president has \u201ccomplete power to pardon.” Some of those kinds of executive moves have been well studied, including Gerald Ford\u2019s swift pardon of Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton\u2019s exoneration of fugitive financier Marc Rich. But the legal territory is largely uncharted over pardons of a president\u2019s own campaign workers, family members or even himself — and how prosecutors\u2019 work would then be affected.<\/p>\n
If Trump begins blocking the progress of the investigation with pardons, federal courts can expect some exercise. But Mueller doesn\u2019t want to leave his case in the hands of Trump-appointed judges.<\/p>\n
Acting as Mueller\u2019s top legal counsel, [Michael Dreeben]\u00a0has been researching past pardons and determining what, if any, limits exist, according to a person familiar with the matter. Dreeben\u2019s broader brief is to make sure the special counsel\u2019s prosecutorial moves are legally airtight.<\/p>\n
And if they do end up in front of the Supreme Court, Dreeben has been there\u2014more than 100 times.<\/p>\n
Dreeben, 62, built that expertise over three decades as an appeals lawyer at the Justice Department. As a deputy solicitor general, he\u2019s pored over prosecutors\u2019 moves in more than a thousand federal criminal prosecutions and defended many of them from challenges all the way to the nation\u2019s highest court.<\/p>\n
That hasn\u2019t always made Dreeben a progressive favorite. Under the charge of defending cases brought by prosecutors, it\u2019s sometimes been Dreeben\u2019s task to push cases where collection of evidence collided with the rights of defendants. But as part of Mueller\u2019s team, Dreeben is the expert in how to make charges stick.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mueller Looks For Ways To Pardon-proof His Case Against Trump Donald Trump has already demonstrated that he\u2019ll pardon anyone, even if that person is clearly guilty and even if a\u00a0sentence hasn\u2019t yet been handed down. The pardoning of Joe Arpaio is a clear signal to those who took part in Trump\u2013Russia that if they…","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":291,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[44],"tags":[54,49,104,33,105,106,46],"class_list":["entry","author-larrynorton","post-588","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-democracy","tag-corrupt-trump","tag-democracy","tag-justice","tag-politics","tag-prosecutor-dreeben","tag-supreme-court","tag-trump"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/nortonspeaks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/Donald_Trump-by-Gage-Skidmore-CC-BY-SA-3.0-.jpg?fit=4272%2C2848","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8bppg-9u","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/nortonspeaks.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/588","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/nortonspeaks.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/nortonspeaks.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nortonspeaks.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nortonspeaks.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=588"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/nortonspeaks.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/588\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":589,"href":"http:\/\/nortonspeaks.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/588\/revisions\/589"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nortonspeaks.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/291"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/nortonspeaks.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=588"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nortonspeaks.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=588"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nortonspeaks.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=588"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}